Sunday, July 31, 2011

That's fuckin' Chinese, you ass. My keyboard doesn't even know that language exists outside of some random key while pressing alt to make a yuan money symbol. Seriously, dude. You know this, because I very specifically did not include "Mandarin" in my language setting.

You're just lucky I know only one word in any Captcha is ever necessary. If I had had to learn Chinese to post my link, I would have been 該死惱怒.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

There's a whole bunch of drunk dudes sitting around. Some have been drinking at home, some have been out, but suddenly everyone is together and one guy makes himself some mac & cheese.

Now it's a food free-for-all.

Who can find the most delicious consumable first? Who can find just what they want?

What's that? Dave has a box of leftover fillet mignon and mushroom Beef Wellington bites in the fridge? Really? Well, I suppose those will sustain us through further imbibing.

It's good you say?

Man, some days I get sad all my friends love drinking more than eating. Then I remember it's okay that I drink like a tiny, frail old lady, because I nearly need a change of pants every time I get to make myself dinner.

Friday, July 29, 2011

This is dedicated to Dean McGowan, who instigated this, and Bryan Haas, who will probably end up reading this and reminding me to mention all the Sports section guys from the college paper.

Everything I Know About Football:

Unless it's the superbowl and I have money riding on the game, I will not understand the rules.

There is a black man with the very white name "Chad" who legally changed his surname to "Eight-Five" in Spanish. Also, everyone in New York is mad at him suddenly, but they never really liked him to begin with.

Bill Belichick's last name means "pretty girl" if you speak American slang in French.

The New England Patriots are bullshit because "New England" isn't a state.

There's a guy named Troy with some serious hair and the voice of a cuddly fop, but I think he could break me in half.

There are two Mannings, one is named Eli, and I never know which one we like least at the moment.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Last night I went all-out on a dinner. It took me like 2 hours, but I made this:

That would be mini beef Wellington pastries (named after the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo), filled with a Crimini mushroom and shallot mixture, and a cucumber-tomato salad with Italian dressing and Gorgonzola cheese.

And a Pepsi. Throwback. With lime.

Check out that pastry puff.

That is a 1 inch cube of tender, seasoned, seared filet mignon–a beef tenderloin–and mushrooms and chopped shallot cooked in the beef's own natural juices, baked up inside a thin, flaky crust. (Oh, and about two dozen extra cubes of beef because the recipe seriously underestimated the need for pastry dough.)

I popped one in the microwave a few hours later and it was still amazing. Someone should fricking market this. Wrap these up in a box or something.

Ah fuck. Is that what those things were supposed to be? No. No, I can't accept that. What I made was delicious and classy! It's the choicest, most buttery beef and delicious mushroom. I don't even like mushrooms and this was amazing. I mean, if I loaded it up with preservatives and decreased ingredient quality until it was affordable to the common NASCAR fan … shit.

I just created gourmet Hot Pockets. At least I didn't burn the roof of my mouth.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Tech news site of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones, All Things D is reporting that Obama's plea to the American people to call their representatives and end the insane, flip-flopping opposition to any plan to deal with national debt has caused several key opposition leaders' websites to crash under the torrent of calls.

Chief among them being Representative John Boehner.

This flood of calls, overwhelming phone and web servers with regular usage in irregular volume, is exactly what hacker groups call "DDoS" attacks. "Digital Denial of Service." It's what Anonymous hackers keep using to piss off Visa and Amazon.com. Of course, politicians have told people to call and write their congressmen for decades. Barack Obama would never intentionally crash his opposition's websites, right?

I mean.

Unless, guys, could President Obama be Morpheus?

And does that mean … dear God. The new, skinny white guy no one has any faith in? Oh no.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Last night I ordered some sesame beef and white rice from the little place down the street, then threw on some clothes to pick it up. Just some jeans from yesterday and my college t-shirt I usually sleep in but today was freshly washed. Oh, and slippers. Slippers that are fully soled moccasins, but slippers nonetheless. Who cares, it's the local Chinese place?

Well there was exactly one other guy waiting on dinner and he was incredibly clean-cut, in very nice suit pants and a crisp white shirt, designer classes and a bluetooth headset, and I later saw him driving an excessively sporty Nissan.

And he went to my college. We shook hands, traded first names and years and majors. He was poly-sci, entering law school. I told him we recently were deciding whether or not to just build one and keep our alumni. He seemed impressed.

So the moral of the story is dress like a schlub, but a schlub of identifiableallegiance.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Nerds, I just started a serious flame war, there. Regular folks, some explaining is in order.

Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are two fairly well-known comic book writers. Morrison's biggest titles include All-Star Superman–which recently got its own abridged animated feature–the recent Batman arc Batman R.I.P., and major DC crossover Final Crisis. Also his original creation, The Invisibles. Ellis, meanwhile, also worked for DC Comics and its Vertigo imprint on series Hellblazer, Bruce Willis/Morgan Freeman/John Malkovich/Helen Mirren basis Red, and major Iron Man relaunch Extremis. He is known for several bat-shit crazy pet projects, most notable among them being Transmetropolitan.

Here's the nerd-rage:
While some (read: Grant Morrison himself [via iO9. This is what actually got me to read the series]) have laid claim to the idea that The Invisibles is a direct basis for the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix film franchise, somehow Warren Ellis doesn't appear to have been sued violently for making an even more similar work in the same media form, closer in time.

Transmetropolitan is a whole series about what The Invisibles was afraid of.

Two bald men with various tattoos, formerly … outspoken hairstyles, near-constant use of sunglasses and identifying as info-terrorists with a mission statement for anarchic truth in the face of totalitarianism and consumerism. Both are brilliant, possibly mad tacticians, dislike undershirts, carry ray guns, enjoy a bit of lethal computer wizardry, and know things that will make you mess your tin foil hat.

Both employ brutality as a matter of course, are at their core righteous bastards (despite outward personae), and are to-the-nines archetypical antiheroes for transhumanist, post-modern, culturally dissective series. From 1994-2000 (with hiatuses), Morrison wrote King Mob's teammate Lord Fanny, a Brazilian transvestite/former-prostitute shaman, who is purportedly well over six feet tall and a blond knock-out, who actually knock you out. From 1997-2002, Jerusalem frequently had blonde amazon/former-stripper assistant/bodyguard Charon Yarrow:

Both teams were financially backed by older gentlemen with a propensity for black suits and thinking only to meet their own ends: Spider's editor Mitchel Royce and Invisible billionaire Mason Lang:

They even sport the same haircut,
and both of their offiices sometimes explode.

Beyond that, and the fact that both series were printed by DC imprint Vertigo, thematic elements are more similar than direct mirrors. The Invisibles is more sorcery and altered consciousness and Transmet is approaching the technological singularity, ironically what the Big Bad from Morrison's book is described as, except as hell also.

Spider is the insane journalist, revealing the truth when Orcer and Control seek to hide it to maintain power. The rest of his time, he's content to fuck off and gripe about how water-ed down and advertisement-filled violent children's cartoons have become. Mob is just a former Spy Romance novelist who became a tantric sex guru and thought-warrior on a higher plane of existence so he could better assassinate evil bug creatures and their minions in all major governments.

The glaring similarity is probably the notion that, on average, 7% of the text on a page is complete tencho-magic jibber jabber, and at times this climes to 100% just to screw with you. It's all real, though. If you were to look up everything that gets said, even the insane babbling, is historically and scientifically something. Holigraphic universes, tulpas, commercial matter reorganizers, they're all explainable, even the things that purposefully aren't real. (Ellis' now-on-hiatus series Doktor Sleepless, a series about not getting the post-singularity jet packs and flying cars future we were promised, even includes tulpas by name.)

Honestly, the only grand difference besides tech v. magic and a hero complex is that Morrison set up a story about saving the world, about averting a terrible apocalypse and hopefully replacing our world with a better one. Ellis' series is entirely about living where you are because The City is a living breathing thing, exactly as Morrison believes, far greater than any of its inhabitants, again exactly like Morrison, but this is the world we live in and there's no grand design, no imminent death, only constant change and rebirth and wonderful spectacles like Nazi sex midgets and gay werewolves and complete information integration. Morrison feared the spiritual singularity as a step beyond our own society. Ellis sees it as our birthright, something to one day become just as mundane as verything else as we grow past it.

Honestly, read through The Invisibles, it's only 59 issues between it's 3 volumes, at least until a part where you get an idea of what Morrison thought America would look like by 2012. Then crack open Transmet #1 and see if Ellis didn't just say, "Yeah, I get you, but you were thinking too small, man."

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Say what you want about her vocal inflections, substance abuse, or orthodonture, Amy Winehouse made sure to die tragically young, and every loves tortured artists who die before their time.

What's more, if Winehouse had the choice of when to go out early, she really couldn't have picked a better opportunity; she snuck in 6 weeks under the wire and ensured her place in The 27 Club.

The "27 Club" is a collection of the super-famous, typically exclusively detailing great musicians, who all coincidentally died at age 27. Prominent members include Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Dave Alexander of The Stooges, The Grateful Dead's "Pigpen," and a "statistical spike" of other musicians from multiple backgrounds and genres.

The Lord did not end up buying her a Mercedes Benz.
However, she did get a pretty sweet Porsche.

Also, Spike Spiegel from anime Cowboy Bebop, but he's A) fictional, B) was designed to be 27, and C) isn't definitively dead because fans love the ambiguity.

"Bang."

Amy Winehouse now gets to be tragic and young and remarkable forever. She will never tour as a washed-up Brit pushing her pathetic wanker of a 7th album. She will never appear in tabloids looking hideous or being criticized for not losing her baby weight two weeks after giving birth. She will never even crack under the pressure of her own success and stringent personal motivations. No critic will ever have an opportunity to deplore her later works as lesser than her early career. She will never fade away.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Captain America always has his origin story in World War II. This is actually kind of a problem.

Unlike Batman, who's parents could have always been murdered "twenty years ago," Steve Rogers was always born in Brooklyn within a few years of 1924. He doesn't age like his Golden Age counterparts, thanks to accelerated healing and a few decades frozen in ice (or time, occasionally).

But here's a quirk: Captain America was presumed dead at the end of WWII, until his frozen form was found and thawed out by The Avengers. The first time the comics did this 1964. Cap had been frozen for 19 years.

Flash forward to 2011 and Samuel L. Jackson explaining to Chris Evans that he's been frozen, "almost 70 years," and we begin to see the issue. The first time Cap was revived, his girlfriend was still alive. I think in some versions she even married Bucky. Steve could go see his war buddies. Currently, Peggy Carter would be about 96. Not exactly fit to go dancing with Steve next Saturday.

Batman's parents were billionaires. It doesn't matter what year it was, they could always have put on their formal wear and dragged a 9 year old out to the theater one night. But Captain America has to start in the mid '40s and then he has to disappear until the 'modern' day, whenever that is. Every time Marvel does a reboot, Captain America looses another decade to time.

In 2045, Rogers will have been frozen for 100 years. At what point does his brain just melt from the culture shock? Will it be like Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, where the one astronaut left floating in 2001 gets found by asteroid ice skimmers a thousand years later and is revived to a world of technology so complex not a single living person can understand every integrated system in even the simplest devices?

Screw that. In the Marvel world, Spider-Man 2099 has cloaking technology and nano-whatevers. After a thousand years, Cap's going to be woken up by Cable popping through his dystopian future while raising Hope Summers.

"My name is Miguel O'Haha. I am a geneticist trying to recreate Spider-Man's powers in others.
In an unrelated story, I gained those exact powers trying to break my forced-addiction to drugs. Really."

After all the world's oceans run dry and toxic, will Cap still be floating in a block of ice somewhere in the North Atlantic?

Friday, July 22, 2011

Marvel's last Avengers prequel is out, today, and it's the prequel to all Avengers prequels. [If you want to watch them in chronological order, it would be Cap, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, then Iron Man 2, with it's final act overlapping with the very beginning of Thor.] Chris Evans redeems himself for ever becoming the Human Torch by becoming the (other) Big Blue Boyscout.

In case you needed a reason to see The First Avenger other than "I saw the last four," and, "I'm seeing Avengers," here's a few you can thaw out.

1. I'm pretty sure the Red Skull took a potshot at Indiana Jones. "The Fuhrer digs for trinkets in the desert." Clearly Hydra chose not to employ Major Toht in Egypt.

So that's what happened to the Red Skull!

2. For all you literary nerds out there: it's a frame tale. For that matter, it's something of a Frankenstein Vs. Good Frankenstein kind of movie.

3. Pretty much every scene with Cap as a U.S.O. propaganda machine.

The costumes.

During a montage, a bunch of kids in Brooklyn are shown reading the first issue of "Captain America" the comic book, and it's the classic 'punching Hitler' cover.

8. *Mini-Spoiler* One scene takes place in Times Square, and if you look closely you will see billboards for 'Bank of America,' 'American Eagle,' and 'Planet Hollywood.' Edgy.

9. The Post-Credits. If it wasn't patently obvious after four other films, Cap has a post-credits scene.

*Complete spoiler you really need to read anyway*

This scene isn't so much a scene as a fully-fledged, extra-long teaser for The Avengers. You can even catch glimpses of Loki, Cap's 'modern' costume and pretty much every hero in full get-up (except Dr. Bruce Banner, but I'd guess he'll be the wildcard). If you see anyone walking out of the theater during the credits, feel free to yell and throw popcorn at them until they retake their seats.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

I fell asleep early tonight, which means I woke up after ridiculous dreams.

Apparently I was hunting a bad Si-Fi channel movie called "(Tiger) Kitten Shark." It was based off a song by bang "A.B.I.," which my brain made up and–when questioned–decided was a terrible acronym for Ace of Bass. The weird thing was, while I was hunting the movie "(Tiger) Kitten Shark," I'm pretty sure I was looking for it because I was being hunted by a real (Tiger) Kitten Shark!

It's basically a terrible Si-Fi movie monster. One of the DeLouise kids had to be in it, seriously. It looks like two smoking hot babes in different bikinis (lateral non-symetry? Must be a government-bred mutant), usually but not always riding an orca-shaped inflatable water toy. At least, it looks like that from the neck(s) down.

That's right, you always see it from underwater, with the head(s) above so you think you're just about to hit on some sexy ladies at the beach. Little do you know that above those lithe and toned vertebrae, the (Tiger) Kitten Shark has the heads of two terrifying …

Kittens.

Oh, but it can tear a man to pieces in a matter of seconds and eats several people a day to feed it's bloodthirsty appetite.

I also remember a pretty sweet hot rod minivan, running on all fours and picking up my laundry I forgot at college, but from my step-mother.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Like those few ads for I Don't Know Which Bank, But It Isn't Mine, I'm starting to actually love my bank.

Mostly, because they seem to think I'm a really interesting person. I went down today to conduct some "biniss" and the whole time I'm the only person in the lobby. The teller starts making smalltalk about the hot weather, and suddenly I'm having a discussion with the other teller and their supervisor about barometric pressure, migraines, epilepsy, self-medication, and Super Mario Galaxy.

So yeah, I like my bank because they give me a $7,000 credit limit without a job and the love Super Mario Galaxy. What's your bank done for you lately?

Sunday, July 17, 2011

This was the first Potter film I've seen in a theater since I think the one with the flamey cup. I know I saw Order of the Phoenix as a download before watching Deathly Hallows 1, but I also know I only saw this last one as a download, so either I blocked a viewing from my memory somewhere or things have gone a bit stupefied.

I got to the theater about 15 minutes before the movie was supposed to start, but it was sold out. From the machine it was sold out, and those things usually spit out tickets for hours after a showing is marked "SOLD OUT" in the ticket booths. As I was going in a second time to get a ticket to the next showing an hour later, a second 7 p.m. showtime popped up on the screen, which I grabbed.

The theater was empty. I mean empty-empty. It was me and some house lights and not even a pre-previews commercial real. I had to go outside and ask the ticket-taker lady what was up, she showed me that, yes, there was a showing starting right then, and she pointed me to Margaret, the floor manager in a black blazer who promised me the same. Apparently, they had just opened up a second showing five minutes beforehand. As I was Tweeting this and firing off "Don't Call Me" texts, a few other people wandered in. All-in-all, I think there were maybe ten of us for the whole show. It was pretty great. I took my favorite seat and spread my legs out and sipped from my contraband water bottle.

*SEMI-SPOILERS*

Nothing here should really be a spoiler. The book's been out for years, and I was definitely the only person in the theater who never read even one of the books.

Best Parts of the Movie:

The Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer – Mostly stock footage from Batman Begins, but with a voiceover between Jim Gordon, looking like he's got emphysema and a spinal tap, lying on his side on a hospital gurney with an oxygen mask. (Maybe he got snapped in half by Bane?) and–it really seems like–Bruce Wayne, discussing the need for him to return as Batman. Except Bruce is all whiny about coming back and Jim's like 'YOU RAN AWAY WHEN WE NEEDED YOU.' Then there's footage of a very tired looking Batman getting into a fist fight with Bane and it's awesome. Lots of slides purporting this to be the "Conclusion" to the "journey."

Neville Longbottom Kicks A Lot of Ass – I mean a lot of it. Apparently, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione dropped out to systematically murder parts of Sorcerer-Hitler's old man soul, Neville was left as the Big Man At Hogwarts and grew like 8 inches.

Harry calls out Snape instead of some long, drawn-out and sneaky plot. Then McGonagall is a little badass.

Just a whole lot of good, old-fashioned, on-screen murder. I mean just tons of it. When you don't care about the characters, at least. Everyone who died heroically in the book which people got pissed about, they still die off-camera just like the sweet owl and the guy with the weird eye in the last movie. BUT. This time you get to see their corpses tragically laid out. (I'm still pissed about the cute-as-hell girl with the purple hair.)

Mrs. Weasley gets to be hella cool.

Snape gets fleshed out and vindicated in about 7 minutes of straight flashback/reveal.

The epilogue is BEFORE the credits, so no waiting for once. Also, at least in David Yates' mind, Emma Watson ages beautifully. I mean 19 years and she still only looks about 20? I'd get behind that even if our kids did turn out gingery.

Lame Crap:

"Pissing your pants stops fire magic, right?"

Draco Malfoy is kind of seriously underused. Similarly, Ginny's fairly useless, in this and every movie.

"It's STEP, SPIN, STEP, TWIRL, Potter! Get it right!"

The final duel between Harry and Voldemort is kind of poorly paced in the final moments. It just sort of ends suddenly and with a whimper. It's realistic (as would be possible for a magical duel in a war zone), but it still feels very un-Hollywood.

The epilogue is literally introduced by a "19 Years Later" white-on-black title card. Not very creative.

For that matter, the "aging" I kept hearing great things about for the epilogue kind of blew.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Our friend Matt was in town this past week, and this little statement got uttered:

"The thing about Portland strip clubs is …"

Is what? All the dancers have MFAs?

The girls all sort of look alike in that they have close-cropped hair, gauged ears, chest tattoos and start out wearing plaid?

They the stage music is by a band you've probably never heard of?

The the proprietor in dominatrix boots doesn't just wear a schoolgirl outfit, she holds a doctorate in library sciences?

…

Actually, it turns out the truth is almost better than those jokes (which might also actually be true):

Most of the strip clubs in Portland carry microbrews at $3-4 a pint. And at least one is owned by a dairy farm mogul, so at his place you can get a steak and good beer for about $10 while you watch a reasonably attractive woman getting naked on stage.

Additionally, I have some very unsettling thoughts about any children conceived with my junk accidentally intermingling with my own our other in vitro Zucker bloodlines. I don't want my kids winding up married and on "I Didn't Know We Were Related" shows. I don't need that kind of publicity.

And now I have to worry about what kind of person would be pulled in by this advert. Apparently, it would be someone who identifies as a "surfer," or at least enjoys surfing on the regs. He would appreciate too traditional Japanese and tribal tattooing, judging from the stylized waves. From the two-tone sunglasses I can infer that he also really really enjoys 3D movies, or is possibly a great fan of Warren Ellis' seminal (pun totally intended .35 seconds after I typed that) graphic novel series "Transmetroplitan."

Also, he would not be creeped out by giant, anthropomorphic spermatozoa, or walking into a building recognized as "the nation's largest sperm bank." That's a lot of little plastic cups, guys.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

By distancing themselves from Earth's center of gravity, astronauts who spend 18 months in the International Space Station shorten their perception of time several ten-thousandths of a second. Effectively, they're using Einstein's theory of General Relativity to infinitesimally (but measurably) increase their own life spans.

Sometimes, because the Earth isn't perfectly spherical, but is an 'oblate spheroid,' I like to remember that I get to do the same thing pretty much any time I climb a latter or a flight of stairs or a small hill.

Granted, I lose out again every time I walk down stairs or fall into a small hole, but eventually I'm hoping that I'll accumulate enough microseconds through my temporal Office Space scheme to outlive the rest of my friends.

Also puts a new perspective on moving to Florida: it's not that old people like the climate better, it's just the closest the can get to actually living on the equator to cheat death a little longer.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Sunday, July 10, 2011

So I feel like I've used this enough to give a not-quite-knee-jerk reaction to this doodad.

You arrange people you want to follow into different "circles," and you don't have to even mutually friend a person, so I have a circle for High School Friends and another for College Buddies and a completely separate one for "Cartoonists I've Never Or Rarely Met." So it's like Twitter, in that I can subscribe to your posts without your express permission (though you can obviously affect the visibility of your posts as you post them.)

Essentially, it's being called Facebook for people who don't like Facebook (the company). Eventually, you'll be able to sign up for this service the same as Blogger or Google Calendar or any of Googles other services just by turning it 'on' with your Gmail account.

You can post text of any length, already format it with BOLDitalics and strikethrough, and then explicitly state (every single time) who gets to see it. You can also use Gchat straight from your feed, group video chat, and group chat in "Huddle," so you can plan things without having to text everybody back-and-forth.

So here's my official review:

Why?

Nothing here is new. At all. There is literally no reason for any of this. It innovates nothing. It adds nothing. The only real benefit of this is for people who dislike Facebook. You love circles? Yeah, I did too. A year ago, when Facebook introduced them as "Lists."

You see that? Facebook has had that for a year already. You can view your feed just for that list just like G+. And You know what else? You can make posts visible to only those groups.

Oh, but you hate how Facebook defaults to sharing everything with everybody?

SO DOES FUCKING GOOGLE!

"But it's so much easier to share with just certain groups on G+!" Are you fucking retaded? (Sorry, "differently tarded.")

It's been right there since you complained about it the first time. And you can change the defaults just like Google copied. Actually, Google+ has fewer privacy options for posts, and even fewer on their settings page.

Here's what Google+ is: It's a long-form version of Twitter, where pictures, video and links don't need shortlinks. Google+ is Twitter without a character limit.

Here's the difference between Facebook and Google+:

Google+ doesn't have apps yet

Google+ isn't social in that you can share something to another person's feed, only share with only them through YOUR feed.

Facebook won't have video chatting until they get theirs working over Skype in a few months.

G+ has all the chatrooms AIM must have sold off in 2001 for being useless.

Reasons to Get Google+

You hate Facebook but NEED to be social in order to contact people via the internet.

You want to video chat without using a Mac, iPhone, Droid, other smartphone, Tinychat, Stickam, Skype, Yahoo, an IM client or any of the other services expressly designed to do that expressly. You know, including Gchat.

You want to be able to message people without that pesky problem of having to use the Private Message service of every other social networking app, and would rather all such messages appear in your Gmail inbox, assuming of course you only have a single email address and not, say, eight of them like anyone else under the age of 35.

You would prefer shuffling between G+ pages for chat, video, email, sharing, photos and you 3 other email addresses to leaving open one window each for mail, facebook, and maybe Twitter. THREE active browser tabs? What are we? Bajillionaires? I gotta PAY for those bytes, brother.

You are a Google Faboy.

That's about it. If you love Google then, by all means, Download the G+ Android app to your Nexus 2 and wait for all your (likely 2) friends to get into the beta and start sharing pictures using thefacebook to G+ photo transfer tool.

That's right, Google+ depends on facebook for the time being to get you interested.

And so far, that's how I've given out every invite I've given. (All three of them.) Facebook.

But go for it, Google. I mean you buy or create a version of every other Most Successful Service, why not through one more in the mix. I'm sure you'll get a few thousand people who exclusively use your product because they think a billion dollar information conglomerate is more trustworthy to hold personal data than a dedicated social network with seasoned legal teams constantly reverting their fuckups.

After all, someone has to hate Mob City notifications that much. (And lack the knowledge to click the 'block app' X button.)

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Another country we'll need to send aid to. Because we can't STOP sending aid to Sudanese civilians affected by the civil war in the south, obviously now we'll have to send EQUALLY to civilian operations on both sides. It would have been great if 1.5 million people had died with no one winning independence, then there'd be rebels and oppressors and we could go in and smash shit like usual and never leave after wasting billions of dollars and thousands of out own lives.

But I suppose fair politics and mutual cooperation will fall out of favor in the news just as quickly.

Friday, July 8, 2011

A few friends of mine recently tried out the new "Green Lantern: Stand Up to Your Fear" stand-up coaster at 6 Flags amusement park. Reviews were … mixed. Perhaps I should explain.

About a year ago I went with another group of friends to the same 6 Flags and we all had a great time, except for one ride I was talked into going on as an "experience." Basically, "Rolling Thunder" is designed poorly. The safety features only work if you are over 5'10" and have at least a 38" waist. Otherwise, you get thrown side to side, front to back, and up and down within your seat, which requires that you have scoliosis and a 40" inseam. If you don't, well, you tend to land directly on your reproductive organs in between getting punched in the digestive tract.

Which raises the issue with Green Lantern: guys tend to hate it. Or at least they act like it's not-so-great, which for a roller coaster is probably worse then Rolling Thunder levels of 'so awful you need to try it.' Stand Up to Your Fear? It's a stand-up coaster with a platform (to stand on, duh) and an over-the-shoulders harness.

Also, to keep your legs from dangling, there's essentially one of these between them:

That would be a wooden torture horse. Traditionally, one is made to sit upon it, possibly weighted. Ironically, it was mostly used on women. I say "ironically" because on the Green Lantern coast, men would find this most discomforting as the device is for "safety" and not torture. Really, it just digs up into your balls a little bit and transfers ever twist and turn and horrible vibration directly into your indelicately cradled scrotum.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Every so often I ask my grandmother what she thinks of the experience when she and her 90 year old friend buy one movie ticket each and then sneak into two others afterward. (Hey, when she was a kid, 5¢ got you a couple cartoons, a movie, a newsreel, another movie and popcorn.)

Color was a big deal for her. Sound was newfangled and hokey to her mother. So what does my grandmother think when she watched a car eject a young man, turn into a giant robot in front of her, shoot another giant robot that used to be some kind of Dodge she doesn't recognize, then turn back into a car and catch the tiny screaming fellow?

I really try to ask politely, hoping that one day she'll give me an answer like, "Well, I know it can't be real, but movies were never real. It looks real, which I guess is the new thing, but it's like seeing a movie, I guess. You just know that whatever is impossible is a cute trick designed to sell a story."

"How do they do that?" is all she ever says.

And before I can ever guide the conversation back the way I want it to go, mom interjects with, "Computers."

I think this is where we're all going, though. We just come to expect the impossible in front of us every time we sit down to watch a block-buster these days. Do you know what the big innovation for "Die Hard" was? Shoes that looked like feet. (So Bruce Willis could run through broken glass safely.) Now, every time I watch a Camaro turn into a fucking giant robot, I get pissy if it doesn't look perfect in the right lighting, or if it doesn't make the right sound.

We're in an escalating war against Suspension of Disbelief. We demand crazier and crazier shit and we demand that it be presented to us in such a way that we can stomach the heightened difference. Eventually, we're just going to get more desensitized and ask for more explosions in the next summer boomfest.